Slowing down reduced supply and raised prices. Survival cost-cutting also put our companies into a state of Covid-induced paralysis. Like a person who is paralyzed – vital systems keep working so we survive, but growth, movement, and improvement all stop. I recall a soccer accident where my knee was damaged. I wasn’t paralyzed but that one leg was immobilized. It took me months to recover after the surgery was completed. The muscles in my leg had shrunk and strength needed to be rebuilt. In normal times, I’d have kept using the muscles and they would have strengthened, not shrunk.

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by Nancy Regan 2 Comments

Was it really Human Error…?

I love yogurt and eat it every day 🥄. My favorite is Oikos Lemon Meringue 🍋. I buy it every week.

But one day, I was unpacking my grocery bags and found that I had bought banana flavored (yuck! 🥺) instead of Lemon Meringue.

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by Joe Anderson Leave a Comment

Self-Accountability Part 2

Step 1: Know your role and your responsibilities

The first step in creating more self-accountability is to start by making an assessment of what your role is and what those specific responsibilities are.

If you’re a father, your role and responsibilities are very different than if you’re the head of an emergency room, or if you’re coach of a basketball team. Every area of your life can have different roles, but the responsibilities of being a father, for example, can impact the responsibilities of being an entrepreneur. You will need to think about how late nights in the office can affect missing Timmy’s baseball game into your plan.

A Different View of the Swiss Cheese Model

Much has been written about James Reason’s original Swiss Cheese Model described in his book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Figure 1 is a basic representation of this model. Many today consider this model to be obsolete because of the evolving complexity of systems due to emerging technologies. Therefore, the linearity of failure expressed in this original model, is not as applicable as it was when introduced.

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by Doug Plucknette Leave a Comment

Facing The Reality of Layoffs

Keeping it honest, layoffs suck.

They suck for the targeted employees and they suck for their immediate supervision and management.

In 1981 I was hired by our area’s largest employer at the time as an incoming apprentice. The day I was hired my soon to be wife and I celebrated she as a schoolteacher and I now had lifelong employment. We could now get married, buy a home, and start a family. In three years it took for me to complete my apprenticeship and for her to complete her master’s in education, we did just that. Life for this young family couldn’t have been better.

And then the layoffs started.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Beware of the Dangers of a Sample Size of One in Business Process Improvement

Modelling your process improvement initiative on another organization’s success is foolish—they are but a sample size of one!

A sample size of one success can also be due totally to luck. To guarantee your process improvement will be a complete certainty you must have repeated proof that what you copy will bring sure success to you too

We love great success stories: The wizard entrepreneur; the person who crusaded for a worthy cause; the champion athlete; the financial guru; the innovative business solution with astounding results; the failing firm that turned their fortunes around; the penniless emigrant whose wits made them wealthy. Those stories are inspirational. They challenge us to be better. They make us want to achieve more in our life roles and with our lives.

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by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Surviving the Recovery – part 1

Are you ready to ramp back up after your Covid-19 slowdown?

Part 1 – Did you fall into the reliability trap?

Covid scared us all! Here you can see two Red Pandas with their version of a threatening response. When threatened, we will have one of three reactions – fight, flight, or freeze.

Our businesses also have similar responses. A few have fought – and they “pivoted.” Some fled – they folded up and went away. Many simply froze – they halted just about everything. If your business froze, then this article is for you.

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by Bryan Christiansen Leave a Comment

4 Signs That Show Your Asset Reliability Program Is Outdated

Asset reliability programs are a set of initiatives for tracking the health, effectiveness and locations of both fixed and moveable assets. It involves routine maintenance, as well as the collection and analysis of equipment operating data to measure efficiency throughout their useful lives.

A good reliability engineering program provides insight on the frequency of asset failures, cost of operation, maintenance and repair, and the quality of maintenance work. Over time, an organization needs to evaluate metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time to failure (MTTF) to ascertain the suitability of the selected maintenance strategy. [Read more…]

by Alex Williams Leave a Comment

Facility Maintenance Software: 5 Benefits of Barcoding Technology

Reduce data entry time and costly errors while boosting productivity by integrating your facilities management software with barcoding technology. Many vendors are offering this technology for facility maintenance software as an included feature or add-on to improve the timeliness and accuracy of data input in their CMMS/EAM systems.

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by Robert (Bob) J. Latino 2 Comments

How Can v Why: What’s the Difference?

When facilitating a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), the proper questioning process will make or break the effectiveness of the entire analysis. When we hear of the 5-Why’s as a valid RCA approach, is simply asking ‘Why?’ 5x good enough….or IS IT JUST OK?

Think about it this way, if I asked you ‘How Could’ the crime have occurred versus ‘Why’ the crime occurred, would your answers be different?

I am going to take a very basic (101) case study and format it using a logic tree (graphical expression of cause-and-effect logic). As we are guided through this mental process we will discuss the differences between asking ‘How Can?’ and ‘Why?’.

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by Andrew Kelleher 2 Comments

Why “Big Data” is NOT the Holy Grail for Process Plant Reliability Engineering

Data is good. Quality data is better. “Big data” is even fashionable. But it won’t help you solve a “small data” problem.

Let me guess. The quality of your CMMS data is not great, but if it was, you could really do something with it. Since decades, in fact. Just need to re-tweak those failure codes!

And recently, you were very tempted by a consultant’s new “data-driven” approach that promised to deliver staggering results. And why not?

Because it’s not a “big data” problem.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How Plant Wellness Way Sites Get Zero Failures

The prime role of Maintenance is to reduce operating risk. Maintenance serves a business well when its use leads to lower production costs than using other choices that could have been taken. Too many managers think that they must maintain plant and equipment. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maintenance is expensive and, as far as it is safe, use less costly answers. But if you do choose to do maintenance, then you ought to pick an operation’s maintenance strategy mix based totally on its effectiveness in delivering the least operating costs for the least maintenance cost.

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by James Reyes-Picknell 1 Comment

Look Before you Leap – Part 3

Get it right on paper before attempting to computerize and automate.

The Work Management Process. One of the biggest uses of IIoT, ML, and AI in the industry (so far) is in the field of condition monitoring and forecasting times to failure. IIoT devices deployed on your equipment and systems, send exception signals (they use edge computing to filter out the vast majority of the data that merely tells you “all is well”) over some sort of network (usually wireless), then some sort of software interface produces a message for you to read (maybe triggers and work request, or sounds an alarm) and then act on.

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by Joe Anderson 1 Comment

Self-Accountability Part 1

In the last blog, we discussed why Self-Awareness is the starting point for any real change. If you aren’t able to honestly know where you are, you’ll never get on the proper path towards where you want to go. The next step in making forward progress is understanding how you got to where you are.

This is where self-accountability comes into the conversation.

Simply put, self-accountability is the understanding that you are the combined result of all of the decisions you make, and actions that you take.

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by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

Reliability and Sabotage the CIA Way

During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives. Their main weapon was bad maintenance.

The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization. The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental. Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.

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